


stumbling blocks

by shadoedseptmbr



Series: L'essai Et Repose [20]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Mission Fic, kind of, settling in, story fill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:48:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26701678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadoedseptmbr/pseuds/shadoedseptmbr
Summary: Kaidan finds his spacelegs (after a stumble or two).
Relationships: Kaidan Alenko/Female Shepard
Series: L'essai Et Repose [20]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1937545
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15





	stumbling blocks

**Author's Note:**

> Four person squad is standard. I don't care what ME gameplay insists on.

“No, and that’s final. I’m pulling rank on this one, Shepard.” Vega paused in his tracks as the Commander frowned up at her newest squad member who was apparently on her shit list. “Corpsman’s privilege. It isn’t safe.”

“Major, we have got to get down there, now, and I want my equipment back to my specs. Now.”

Alenko shook his head with a shrug. “You can do the run with your lights on, the cloak hides them if you need to disappear.”

“They bleed through first, I’ve had enemy pick up on the trail.” She was holding onto her reasonable rational tone by the edge of her teeth.

“This isn’t even an infil op! If.. if something happens to the telemetry, Commander, I need to be able to find you in the dark.” Vega heard the stumble in that sentence. Someday, someone was gonna fill him in on the details between these two if he had to sit on them to make it happen but a glance at the Turian beside him said it wasn't going to be today.

She glared at him for a full minute while Vega and Garrus both focused their full attention on their weaponry and tried to look very small. They had both been the target of that particular laser strafe. The Major didn’t even flinch. 

“We’ll talk about this later.” She stalked into the shuttle and Alenko rubbed his forehead. Maybe a little residual damage, then.

Vega gave it a beat before he offered, “Thanks, Major. We’ve been arguing that one since…”

“The first time we stormed a Collector ship.” Garrus finished for him, the vibrato of his voice leaning into a growl.

Alenko shook his head at them. “I can’t believe you let her get away with it. She was hard enough to keep track of under fire before the cloak.”

The Turian’s mandibles flared in a humourless laugh. “ _Let_ her. Hmm. Yes, that’s what we did.”

“You can pull rank, man. The rest of us just have to duck and weave.”

Shepard’s voice grated out of the shuttle interior. “Let’s go, people! We’ve got scouts to find.”

Garrus tapped Kaidan’s shoulder as they waited for Vega to load his gear bag. “Tali slipped a program in after she joined up, to get some of the lights to come on if Shepard had been gone too long. We never told her and we never had to use it but it helped the rest of us sleep at night.”

Kaidan lifted his eyebrows. “That sounds useful. You know an email for Tali? I could adapt it for Alliance specs.”

Garrus shook his head, “She went back to the fleet after we got back to Omega. I had a couple of pings from her a few months ago but nothing since the Reapers hit. Quarians are keeping their heads down. We’ve got some rumors about the Perseus Veil.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen some too.” The door slid shut behind him.

Shepard stood behind Cortez, watching as he guided the Kodiak out of the bay and into the upper atmosphere of Utukku. She tapped her armored fist on the pilot’s shoulder before turning around, picking up on Tali’s name. “Hackett pinged me just before we left. Quarians have been making some noise over in the Far Rim and we finally got a fix. We’ll hit them up after we get clear, here.”

Garrus and Kaidan shared a look but Garrus replied casually. “It’ll be nice to see Tali, again. Wonder what she’s been up to?”

“Guess we’ll find out.”

000000000000000000000000

Kaidan resisted the urge to bang his head against a bulkhead. Garrus and Vega had peeled off as soon as the shuttle door had winged open but he’d gone up to the War Room with Shepard, to get feedback from Hackett. Other than a growled, “Major,” she’d barely acknowledged his existence when he’d indicated he was hitting the shower, after.

She’d gone shields up as soon as she’d hauled Grunt back to his squad and said goodbye, dropping down to slouch on the floor of the shuttle’s crew bay to spare the seats from their grotty armor and type out a preliminary report for HQ about the status of the reaperized Rachni.

It wasn’t two weeks after he’d waited nervously on the Citadel dock, outside of the airlock, practically begging her to ask him back aboard the Normandy. Two weeks after he swore he’d have her back, that he wouldn’t question her, again. But he was reeling, trying to reconcile the Shepard who had at least been willing to talk to him on the Citadel with this silent treatment. 

He’d bitten his tongue _hard_ when she’d squashed any hope of the Rachni queen’s escape. He still hadn’t managed to bite off the question in his, “Commander?” If it hadn’t been Vega with them- if it had just been Garrus and him- he’d have gone on.

The Krogan, Grunt, had been important to her, been a friend she’d thought she’d lost. The Ravagers and their Swarmers were an obvious, desperate threat. He wasn’t questioning _that._

Kaidan had read the unclassified report of the genophage cure after he came aboard, trying to catch up. How she’d lost another friend from the Collector mission, reading between the cold lines of _Mordin Solis took it upon himself to repair the tower functions and enact the cure_ and _The Reaper damage to the tower was irreparable, though the cure was dispersed before it exploded, No survivors._ How she’d shunted aside salarian help to give Wrex’s people a fighting chance, despite all evidence that maybe the krogan would be a problem later. And now the salarians were cooperating, anyway, after she and Krios saved the Councillor. _That_ sounded like his Shepard. Look at all the options and bypass the door to a third way.

But the Rachni queen? Shepard had saved her, taken a huge risk during the hunt for Saren to save something unique. It had been one of the things that he’d fallen in love with. All that unknown danger, all that chance of it turning around to bite her in the ass and Aedan still did all she could to bolster that amazing idea of a species reborn, saving a song. He could still remember her speaking on the ship’s comm from just behind Joker’s shoulder; stars reflecting in her eyes when she told the crew, when she’d made the case for giving the Rachni a chance.

This Shepard had simply snarled and walked away.

“We will embrace the silence.” _God_ Kaidan shuddered at the memory of the resignation in the sibilant borrowed voices.

He paced the hallway, again. They’d have lost that Krogan unit, though. Even he could tell how important the Aralakh squad had been to Grunt, despite missing some of the back story. It hadn’t been simple and it hadn’t been the wrong decision- Hackett had obviously approved the choice when they made their report. But there had to be more to it than saving a unit of heavy fighters. 

He’d looked in the CIC for her; ducking into the cockpit, as well.. She wasn’t with Garrus tearing apart their rifles for cleanup from the Ravager goop and she seemed to avoid Liara’s nest on the starboard side of the ship. Kaidan wasn’t going to barge into the cabin, now. Not when they were still feeling their way past his stumble over the fish tank. But he had to talk to her about this, in private as professionals, and she was nowhere to be found.

“Uh. EDI?”

“Yes, Major?”

“Shepard’s not...she's not in her cabin, is she?”

“No, Major.”

“Ok, thanks.” He could feel the AI’s presence over his shoulder, waiting for him to ask. He wasn’t going to. He either knew Shepard or he didn't. The cabin wasn’t where she’d go for privacy, anyway- it had clearly never felt very private to her.

He flicked the interface of the elevator, down to engineering. He hadn’t seen the storage cubby below engineering on his tour but the steel-framed staircase was similar enough to the SR1 and he took a chance it was still there. 

Kaidan had followed Shepard down to the tiny dark space on the Normandy, before. Once, after Virmire. After Ashley. He hadn’t intruded on Shepard, then. He’d been so sure he’d mess it up. Just sat on the stairs until she’d pushed herself tiredly to her feet and started up and he backtracked in a scramble. She’d told him later that she appreciated him keeping watch. Grinned at him when he sheepishly admitted his worry. 

The engines were as loud on the edge of the stairs down to the cargo space as they would be in Engineering proper, the rhythmic, echoing thud of the drive core threatening to trigger a headache if he lingered too long. Like everything else on the SR2, it was a bigger space, though still low ceilinged and claustrophobic, shrouded in dim light. 

Kaidan almost missed the noise in the drone of the systems- if he hadn’t been so focused on trying to find her he’d have ignored it; a choked, half-swallowed sob. He hesitated, then padded carefully down the stairs. 

Shepard was sitting on the floor, curled up with her chin on her knees. Wedged between a cot and a small table, surrounded by stacks of empty heatsink boxes and cables. He could just see her, head down -dark in the reddish light, one hand covering her face, the other fisted, white-knuckled, on her knee. Shadows danced across her from a tiny, slender candle flickering; stuck to the metallic tabletop with a wax drip.

Reality slammed him in the chest like a cryo-shot from that sniper rifle she was so fond of. There was nothing flippant or cold about the choice Shepard had made in the bowels of the tunnel, surrounded by husks and the stench of dying insectoids and her friend, begging for the lives of his squad. There weren't two Shepards, before and after. There was just Aedan, the woman he loved.

The Aedan who had marveled with him over the Rachni was right there, grieving the loss of all the queen’s possibilities. She hadn’t been mad at him for questioning her decision. Well, maybe not just for questioning, anyway. She’d been holding herself together, just long enough to do her damned job.

Kaidan’s first impulse was to head down the stairs and pull her into his arms but he latched it down. This was her bolthole -he could see a small stack of ration bars on the table and a folded black blanket on the cot- and he had no inclination to make it feel unsafe. Either the crew knew this was where she went to block the world out and respected that or he was the only one (besides EDI, he supposed) and he wasn’t going to drag her out of it before she was ready. 

She was in command. He knew- maybe better than anyone- how important it was to her to keep up the front. And he’d stepped on that enough already, today.

But once upon a time, he’d been her Staff Lieutenant. It had been _his_ job to handle crew comfort. It had been her last command, before...everything. 

Comfort, he could do. He turned quietly up the stairs and headed back to crew deck. Rummaging in the kitchen lockers for a late night snack had turned up her stash of chocolate, tucked behind some Quarian spices and a box of dried fungi. 

He’d just pulled the vac-bag of syrup out of the cupboard when EDI’s voice came from across the counter top, modulated to not carry beyond them. “There is cream in the refrigeration unit. It was resupplied before we made the jump to this system.” 

“Thanks, EDI.” 

"Of course, Major."

There might still be someone spying on Shepard, but Kaidan was fairly confident this one was on her side.

Half an hour later, Shepard was shuffling through the crew deck, face blank, her little black roll of tooling instruments tucked under her arm. A couple of the CIC crew (Copeland, he thought, and maybe Campbell? He needed to catch up) seemed to recognize the mood and shifted, subtly, out of her path as they headed to lunch. Kaidan caught her right before she jogged past the sleeper pods and handed her his peace offering.

Shepard scowled at the black and white cup, but took it from his hand. “What’s this...oh,” She took a breath of warmth and sweetness and tried a cautious sip, eyes big and only the slightest bit red over the rim of the mug; she’d hit the cabin to fix her eyeliner. “Hey, you remembered.”

“Hey, yourself. Yeah, I did.” He held back an impulse to run his thumb, warm from the coffee, over her forehead. Gotta keep up the front.

She took another sip and he could see tension leeching away from between her slanted eyebrows, something loosening in her shoulders. “Kaidan, about the queen. I’d’ve done it differently if...”

He waved her off. “No, I get it. There are only so many chances you can give, right?”

“The margins are gonna be so small. I just couldn’t risk it.” She rolled one shoulder with a grimace. Same shoulder she’d been favoring the other day. Hmm. 

‘“I know.”

Shepard lowered the cup and he stood stoically under another of her steely eyed examinations- this wasn't even the first time today he'd been the butterfly to her pin. This time, though, the pin was blunted. She blinked. “Hunh. You do, don’t you?”

“I do. Not always gonna agree, though.”

Fair warning earned him a crooked smile and a chuckle. “Kaidan, if you agreed with me about everything, I’d start thinking _you_ were a plant.”

He nodded, “That’s fair.” 

She tipped her head in invitation and he fell into step with her on the loop around the mess hall. “I ran into an asari, on Illium, last year who said the queen had rescued her when her ship went off course. There was just something...odd about it. She was so...I mean, I guess she was just real calm and grateful not to have starved to death in space but it felt like there was something else,” Aedan shook her head and hummed, gruffly. “I couldn’t put a finger on it but it felt like the queen had some hold on her.”

That filled in the gap he'd been missing. “That doesn’t sound good. So you were thinking there was something else going on?”

“I don’t know. Can you imagine if I let her go and she could influence, even indoctrinate people? Javik told me the Rachni were around for his cycle. What if she was like the Collectors, somehow? Another front for the Reapers? She might not have even known.”

“That makes sense, Shepard. You put all that in the report?” They’d hit the hall in front of the starboard lounge and he slid the door open and followed her inside when she turned in.

“Hackett knew already, I catalogued it in one of the data drops I did last year and one of my write ups while I was under arrest. I tried to document everything, in case anything was more important than I realized. Or if it wasn’t me who ran into the Rachni the next time.” 

”I saw a couple of the data drops,” he confessed, leaning back against the window frame. “Ran through some of the records after I got Spectre clearance.” 

She looked surprised. “Yeah? All of that’s on file, still?”

“I don’t know if all of its there. Some of the reports are in the Spectre datafiles, what they found important, I guess. Not sure how they got it.”

Her smile was cynical. “More than one Spectre had contacts with the Shadow Broker. Probably got it from him, before Liara took over. Or maybe Liara was trying to get it spread around.” Aedan speculated. “I’ll ask her.”

He leaned in, just a little. Still trying to respect her space. “You know, I’m gonna want to hear that story?” 

She finished off her coffee and shot him a half grin. “There was a report of that, too.” 

“Uh hunh, I saw it. A diagram of a massive ship with the addendum: _Contacted by Liara T’Soni, Cerberus intel indicates location of the Shadow Broker’s base on Hagalaz. Infiltrated to rescue an acquaintance of T’Soni. T’Soni now running operations._ ” He quoted with a smirk. “I’m pretty sure there’s more to it.” He took a small chance and reminded her, “I used to be fairly familiar with how your official reports read versus your actual missions.” 

“Still are, seems like.” Her voice was soft. They stood on opposite sides of the window, stars flickering just a handbreadth away.

Her omnitool pinged and the moment slipped away as Garrus’ voice came up, “Shepard, are we still going to take apart that new rifle scope we scavenged on Utukku? I think it’s going to add at least a half meter to our shots into smoke. Well, your shots.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m on my way, gotta swing through the Mess.” She raised an eyebrow as she gathered up her empty mug. “Thanks for this. But, we're still gonna talk about my running lights, Major.” 

Kaidan spread his hands and shrugged. “I’ll be here, Commander. With every safety reg in the book on my side.” He called out to her as she strode out the door, her rolling gait back in full swing. “Garrus and Vega agree with me, by the way. Ask them!” And he had to swallow a little satisfied smile when she huffed at him over her shoulder.


End file.
